


The Quiet Edges

by Jintian



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1999-09-20
Updated: 1999-09-20
Packaged: 2017-10-29 20:22:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/323819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jintian/pseuds/Jintian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Close encounters of the first kind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Quiet Edges

  
Rain hissing in the air outside, the window streaked with droplets. Mulder stood and looked down into the alley outside his apartment, where the puddles were interrupted by circles that grew larger and met and broke each other.

Raining. And he glanced down at himself, buttoning the sleeves of his shirt, unable to remember where the umbrella was. The phone, silent as it had been all night, sat on his desk.

On the street he walked to his car and the air was scented with precipitation. The heavy, living smell of water from the clouds. Water that hit his head and cheeks, made dark spots on his clothes. He paused a moment before getting into the driver's side, looking around at the clean gray morning.

Different now, different. The rain. Outline of clouds barely visible in the sky, yes that is the same, but the wet on my skin and the light of the hidden sun. Different. And I inhale the living scent and hold it in my nostrils.

Rain that was in her hair, that was in the night, in the graveyard rain and Scully laughing between the soaking drops and Scully when we got back to the hotel her hair was stringy and wet, her face was clean and smooth. The tiny spot above her lip with the makeup washed away and Scully did you ever laugh again, did you ever --

Sitting, buckling his belt, ignition. The train of thoughts broken as he drove under a bridge, lost in the brief silent pause where the downpour was interrupted.

*

She was not usually the first to arrive at the office in the morning. Year after year, she would step in the elevator and descend. She would walk the closed-in basement hallways, grasp the handle of the door adorned with Mulder's nameplate. If he was not there already, waiting for her at his desk or pacing about with another X-File, she would know something was wrong. That he had left her again, that something had happened to him.

The office was silent and enclosed now and she sat in his chair, angled towards the door. There were papers on the desk scattered and scribbled over with his unmistakable handwriting, but she did not touch them. Even now, even though she had written on some of the papers herself, expense reports, autopsy summaries, she did not touch the things in his personal space. But under the desk she toed off her shoes and flexed her feet.

The old clock on the wall, marking the slow slide of time, said it was not yet seven o'clock. Outside it was raining, but she could not hear the sounds. She could hear nothing but the minor, background tickings of the A/C unit and the aging basement architecture.

Six years of learning him, and when was the last morning, anyway, when she had woken beside someone after making love? When was the last time she had even thought about it, pulling her head out of the work and taking a long, careful look around?

He would be here soon, and she was not sure what she would say to him then.

*

It should be easier than it is.

Maybe we are built that way at first. As babies and small children, the reaching hand is an extension of the emotion. Love flashfires through the heart and without shame or fear we cling to parents' legs. Heads tilted back, opening throats for laughter.

I wish I had not lost that innocence, that there had never been shields around the burning core of the heart. To live for years restraining hands and lips, eyes, thoughts even. My desires....

Yesterday in her apartment she rose from her couch, stretching. I looked up from the case file and watched her walk towards the kitchen. Barefoot, she was sinuous and graceful, her body a dark river in loosened work clothes.

She glanced back at me, a flicker of blue questioning gaze, and asked, "Something to drink?"

And then I, too, was rising from the couch, feeling the world tilt in a gentle arc around me as I followed her. She was on tiptoes, reaching into a cabinet. I looked down and was captured by the fabric of her pantsuit, clinging to her bare calves.

My mouth was open, and I watched her.

It should be easier than it is. To speak, to let loose the restrained words that had never really needed restraint anyway. Never needed restraint because fear was always the dominant emotion, fear stronger and silencing all else.

Later somehow I remember my hand was on her shoulder, flesh against the black, and I --

leaned close and I --

felt myself slipping into her --

*

The clock.

Ticking, and Scully glanced at the wall.

At seven fifteen the door opened. She sat up straight, watching him fill the entryway and step in. His suit, a light gray, was rain spattered.

And she remembered his hot wet lips at her throat, his hand roaming at the small of her back and the other pressing at her shoulder, pressing her into his clothes and the smell of him all around and inescapable.

God oh God if I have ever had an ounce of self-control.

Her mantra, her way of counting sheep, only it hadn't worked. All night she had tossed and turned at the memories surfacing like secrets from a deep pond.

He closed the door behind him and leaned against it. Not speaking. Looking, with furrowed brow and deep golden eyes.

And what is it about the passage of time that changes people? Once she had hoped, had let a tiny flame burn, wondering how he saw her outside of His Partner Scully. She knew wishing for it was wrong. She knew it was an invitation to trouble, but infatuation is an uncontrollable thing and she was experienced enough to know it must run its course.

There had been a time when she knew he would never make the first move. And because she wouldn't, either, she had resigned herself to the straight and narrow path of their relationship. The simple, uncomplicated one. No distractions.

And that was the way it had to be, Dana Scully ever the strict professional, she's learned so much from that failed relationship with Jack, she knows better than to let any other FBI man in her pants....

Yes, I knew better, I knew it so well that I lost any faint hope of it ever happening. I chose...not to.

What floored her now was Mulder deciding the opposite. Out of the blue and unsuspecting nowhere, there he had been pulling her closer, nothing to stop them, nothing to make her jerk away unless it was her own inclination.

If I have ever had an ounce of self-control.

Last night, her phone rang, his hands had been exploring the curves beneath her shirt with a sweet, sweet heat and as she broke the embrace to focus on the sound their warmth fell away. Away.

Trembling, she turned her back on him to answer it.

And when, after she had said goodbye to her mother, when she had raised her eyes back to his, the air had long since cooled. Long since calmed, the storm blown itself out.

*

It was not true that she was the most beautiful woman to him. He had never been inclined to redheads, and he liked his women cool, silent, mysterious. But unbelievable event after unbelievable event had forced them into so many pains of growth and change that he looked back at himself six years ago and saw a stranger.

Who was that man, former smoker, former husband, former son of divorced parents with younger child missing? His belief in lasting relationships was just as strong as his belief in God, and he remembered driving through Virginia with Scully on a rainy afternoon, debating the existence of an omniscient Creator. He had been so thankful that she was safe there beside him, wearing the cross he had found in the trunk of Duane Barry's car, that he didn't mind her contradicting him on every point.

Truth to tell, he had come to expect such arguments from her. He had come to expect so many things. The fact that every morning she would drink coffee, cream no sugar, the fact that she got flustered waking abruptly from naps, the fact that she would call his cell phone at the slightest suspicion he was doing something wrong.

"Mulder, it's me," she would say, and more often than not the world would shutter down until her voice was the only thing he heard, the only thing he knew.

So much is left unfinished in life, because courage is such a rare, hidden quality. Imagine that Fox Mulder, Special Agent with the FBI, Oxford graduate and product of a dysfunctional family, might one rainy morning be pressing himself against his own office door as if his partner were a firing squad.

She stood, coming around his desk with the same liquid grace of the night before, and the sight of her stocking toes made him want to fall on the floor in worship.

I don't know what love is, I don't know that groundless emotion that seems to flare and fade so easily. But what I do know is the life I have led, lonely and hopeless and dark until the day she came down here to find me.

*

"I don't think," she said, "that this is the best place to talk."

He nodded, thinking of the small, strong bones of her collarbone, the sweet hollows where shoulder met neck.

He nodded, but did not move, instead cleared his throat to speak.

"You would have," he said.

It was not a question. The words he had pondered through the sleepless night, watching them roll in his palm like raindrops.

Scully paused just before reaching him, angling her face up the same way she had for years. Eyes direct, unafraid.

"Yes, I would have."


End file.
